Both gender and narrative are foundational to the ways in which humans engage in meaning-making. Arguing from evolutionary, psychological and feminist theoretical perspectives, we posit that narratives and gender are culturally mediated mutually constituted meaning-making systems: Narratives are defined through gender and gender is defined through narrative. To contextualise this argument, we define ‘narrative’ and ‘gender’ and review the extant literature on how gender is expressed in culturally mediated master narratives and how narratives are performed differently by women and men. Our core argument is that the very act of narrating is a gendered activity that constructs, represents and narrates gender as a primary category of human existence, and these fundamentally gendered ways of narrating then construct, define and reify gendered ways of being in the world.

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Fivush, Robyn, and Azriel Grysman. Narrative and Gender as Mutually Constituted Meaning-Making Systems. Memory, Mind, and Media 1 (2022): e2. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/memory-mind-and-media/article/narrative-and-gender-as-mutually-constituted-meaningmaking-systems/0D4CA4E06A2BB220351164A4C800B9C8

Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.

Azriel Grysman is a professor of Psychology at Dickinson College.